[PD] style guide idea: [send foo] versus [; foo(

[Mathieu Bouchard]

On Wed, 25 Mar 2009, Jonathan Wilkes wrote:

> --- On Wed, 3/25/09, Mathieu Bouchard <matju at artengine.ca> wrote:
>> Well, ideally, perhaps... but I think that it's
>> somewhat hard to do. Perhaps more so when teaching in French
>> (or any other language apart from English), because then you
>> have to deal both with the synonyms in French and the
>> synonyms in English at the same time.
> At least in English, which is all I've taught in, it's merely a 
> practical matter of using one consistent term instead of using many 
> interchangeably.

I know, but when using various materials that are using various different 
conventions, or when answering questions that have been asked using 
different words, it's hard to keep using the same word over and over. I 
see myself correcting students on the uses of words like objects vs 
classes, but that's not for the same reason at all, as this is for 
resolving the nameclash between "object" the synonym of "class" and 
"object" the other meanings of it. Since the synonyms for connections are 
not clashing with much of anything else in a significant way (perhaps 
"line" is...) it's not the same reason for correcting speech and I'm not 
quite used to that.

OTOH, the upside to using words interchangeably is that people get used to 
the synonyms that they will have to use in real situations... even if I 
only accidentally use them.

If I made a tutorial or a set of tutorials, I'd probably end up calling it 
by just one name, but if I'm using other people's tutorials together with 
mine, I'm probably not going to search and replace.

Perhaps it's just that pd-list, pd-dev and #dataflow are extreme cases of 
people coming together with different words, and that I don't recall 
enough the last real course I taught... it's been a while.

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| Mathieu Bouchard - tél:+1.514.383.3801, Montréal, Québec